This disclosure relates generally to communicating content to online system users, and more specifically to identifying users to receive content from a third party system based on information maintained by an online system.
An online system, such as a social networking system, allows its users to connect to and communicate with other online system users. Users may create profiles on an online system that are tied to their identities and include information about the users, such as interests and demographic information. The users may be individuals or entities such as corporations or charities. Because of the increasing popularity of online systems and the increasing amount of user-specific information maintained by online systems, an online system provides an ideal forum for third party systems to distribute content to users. For example, third party systems may communicate messages identifying products or services by presenting content to online system users via an online system.
However, many applications executing on client devices and presenting content to users process content received by a client device to identify unwanted messages, for example, by applying one or more filters to the received content. Based on application of the filters, certain content may be stored instead of presented to a user by the client device. For example, content from a third party system satisfying certain filter criteria is placed in a particular folder of the application, while other content that does not satisfy the certain filter criteria is presented to the user by the application. However, filtering of content may generate false positives that erroneously prevent presentation of content by an application.
Certain applications present notifications to a user when the application receives content from a third party system. A notification is presented by a client device executing the application to indicate that the application has received content, prompting a user to access the application and view the content. For example, a notification presents a visual indication on a client device that an application has received content to cause a user to access the application and view the content. To regulate information presented by a client device, a user authorizes an application to present notifications via the client device, which limits the type and number of notifications presented by the client device. While notifications allow a third party system to increase the likelihood of a user viewing content, because many third party systems maintain a limited amount of information associated with users, limiting the ability of the third party system to select to receive various content. This reduces the amount and type of content identified to a user via notifications associated with applications.